Two- and one-dimensional gap solitons in spin-orbit-coupled systems with Zeeman splitting

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the formation and stability of 1D and 2D gap solitons in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates with Zeeman splitting, using local interactions and analyzing their properties and stability criteria.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism for stable semi-vortex gap solitons supported by local interactions, with analytical solutions in 1D and stability analysis in 2D.

Findings

Stable 2D gap solitons exist with cross/self interaction ratio below ~0.77.

All excited 2D solitons with vorticities are unstable.

Exact analytical family of stable 1D gap solitons was derived.

Abstract

We elaborate a mechanism for the formation of stable solitons of the semi-vortex type (with vorticities 0 and 1 in their two components), populating a finite bandgap in the spectrum of the spin-orbit-coupled binary Bose-Einstein condensate with the Zeeman splitting, in the two-dimensional free space, under conditions which make the kinetic-energy terms in the respective coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations negligible. Unlike a recent work which used long-range dipole-dipole interactions to construct stable gap solitons in a similar setting, we here demonstrate that stable solitons are supported by generic local interactions of both attractive and repulsive signs, provided that the relative strength of the cross/self interaction in the two-component system does not exceed a critical value ~ 0.77. A boundary between stable and unstable fundamental 2D gap solitons is precisely predicted by the Vakhitov-Kolokolov criterion, while all excited states of the 2D solitons, with vorticities (m, 1 + m) in the two components, m = 1, 2, ..., are unstable. The analysis of the one-dimensional (1D) reduction of the system produces an exact analytical solution for the family of gap solitons which populate the entire bandgap, the family being fully stable. Motion of the 1D solitons in the trapping potential is considered too, showing that their effective mass is positive or negative if the cubic nonlinearity is attractive or repulsive, respectively.